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Geek Culture / Do you use programming to do somethign useful for you(not for programming)

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Three Score
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Posted: 9th Dec 2006 04:35
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Does anyone use your programmign skills to do somethign useful that you'd normally have to take a lot of time to do?(but not programming to help you program!)
for me...

My math teacher has some extra credit stuff that anyone can do...
for instance, theirs a lot of base conversions(the hard base 3 and 5 and 7 stuff) so I use itoa to figure convert the bases and get the extra 2 points..
Also theirs almost always somethign to do with counting.. like this month their was "what is the sum of the first 200 even numbers" so I made a little program to add them up... it took me about 15 minutes to make the program and the person that beat me to it took like 2 hours counting...lucky me

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Jess T
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Location: Over There... Kablam!
Posted: 9th Dec 2006 04:52 Edited at: 9th Dec 2006 04:56
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Sum of the first 200 even numbers... So that's 2 through to 400, right?

And 400 + 2 = 402
4 + 398 = 402
...
Therefore, the sum = 402 * 100 = 40200

Do I get extra credit..?


[EDIT]
Sorry, that didn't really answer your post, did it?

Yeah, I've written programs to help me with things before.
Once, I downloaded alot of MSDN, but the program I used (HTTrack) put in some funky formatting, and left parts out which caused none of the pages to load.
15 minutes later, I ran a batch DBP app which edited all the files to remove a few particular lines of HTML, and voila! The pages all load and work perfectly
[/EDIT]

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PowerSoft
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Posted: 9th Dec 2006 09:31
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Well as it's an Arithmetic Progression you can do something like:

a=2 d=2

Un = a + (n - 1)d
which gives
Un = 2 + (n - 1)2


and for the sum

Sn = 0.5n(2a + (n - 1)d)
which gives
Sn = 0.5n(4 + (n - 1)2)


So sub in 200...
S(200) = 100(4 + (199 x 2))
= 40 200

Unless I went very wrong...



On topic, I do a bit. Made some maths apps etc to help solve answers. Quite fun really...

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Manic
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Location: Completely off my face...
Posted: 9th Dec 2006 14:46
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At work we use a system called CSS, which lets you make macros. After making a couple of simple macros, i found that you could actually code the macros in basic. So i made a macro for a particular job, which took the average job time of 3-4 minutes down to 3-4 seconds. I got a bonus for that too.

Since then, i found that CSS's basic runs off a library, which you can easily reference in Excel or Access or any other Office App. Doing that let me create programs that could run through massive lists of jobs and do them automatically.

What started off as a very dull data entry job, has now changed into a programming job, which actually ensures i don't just pass out from boredom at work.

Sadly, i'm only a temp, so i still only get paid £6.50 an hour, even though i'm single handedly keeping the whole of BT afloat.

Martin

I don't have a sig, live with it.
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Kentaree
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Posted: 9th Dec 2006 15:05
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Well, it pays the bills

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hyrichter
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Posted: 9th Dec 2006 15:18
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I've built a few small useful apps for myself. I wrote me a label printing program for printing shipping labels back when I used to sell stuff on eBay a lot. I also built a small program to quickly calculate payroll taxes for my father's cabinet business.

My latest useful app is an alarm clock, believe it or not. My alarm clock died, and I couldn't find a decent one locally, so I decided, what the crap, I'll just build my own. Spent about 10 minutes in Delphi, and have me an alarm clock that wakes me up to whatever music I want.

Good performance is better than a good excuse.
CodeSurge -- DBP Editor for serious programmers.
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CattleRustler
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Posted: 9th Dec 2006 16:46 Edited at: 9th Dec 2006 16:48
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I wrote a TimeSheet app that I use to track my billable hours and various expenses for my programming consultant work (self-employed). It stores entries in a little local msaccess databse. You can generate summaries across date ranges to create simple invoices and a more detailed invoice-like reports that I file away for tax purposes etc.

The place I was doing work for was interested in me porting this little app to use their sql server, and let the employees use it instead of their manual sign-in sheets but it never went forward. The ability to use it for multiple employees was built in from the beginning, but w/e

Over the years I have always written little apps or utils for personal use, we probably all have at some point. Who can forget the multi-converter I posted here forever ago, converts text to like 8 different things like hex, decimal, or even 1337 and morse code



Its 9/11 - but its FAKE 9/11 Ts=SQRT(Df/16)
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mm0zct
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Posted: 10th Dec 2006 02:42 Edited at: 10th Dec 2006 02:47
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I wrote an quick c++ app to calculate all the averages uncertainties and errors for the large datasets that i produced in my advanced higher physics experiments ( the data was collected with a computer so i just had to write a program to parse the data in a text file and produce the stuff i wanted) too like 5 mins to make the app insteal of hours doing it by hand.
It also it meant i could include it in the appendix of my project

edit:
int j=0;
for (int i=0 , i<=400, i+=2) j+=i;

shouldn't take 15 minutes to write

AMD athlon 64 3000+, 1GB ddr400, 720GB total hdd, ati radeon x700pro 256mb (pci-e) 17" tft(@1280x1024).
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Three Score
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Posted: 10th Dec 2006 02:55
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well sorry but it took a bit to think up how to do it(I didn't do it that well optimized, my code was like 6 lines)..also I was watching futurama so bah!

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Grog Grueslayer
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Posted: 10th Dec 2006 13:10
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I've probably made more apps than games... and usually the apps get finished. Back when I had a BBS I made apps to make ansi lastcaller lists, quotes, highscore lists for the online games, and Tradewars data snoopers/editors (probably much more I can't think of right now). The last application I made in Quickbasic was a program to automatically do the count of the people that come to our local food closet (that program saved me about 5 hours work vs doing it manually). So far I've only completed one app in Darkbasic... a program for my dad to track the amount of insulin he needs based on his current blood sugar.

I'm currently working on an app that does everything we need at the local food closet... I'm trying to automate everything to reduce human error.
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Three Score
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Posted: 10th Dec 2006 16:33
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Quote: "I'm trying to automate everything to reduce human error."

have you forgot about programming error though!?

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Grog Grueslayer
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Posted: 10th Dec 2006 21:27
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I'm squashing errors as soon as I notice them. It doesn't matter what I'm doing... when I see an error everything else stops till it's fixed. I'm sure that's the way most of us program.
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bitJericho
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Posted: 12th Dec 2006 20:00
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I wrote a program to parse all the winning lotto numbers...

Needless to say, I didn't win

I just got to be a producer, drink champaign until I puke! DRINK CHAM-PAIGN TILL HE PUUUKES..
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